Mitigation of land-sea contamination in SMOS

Since its launch in November 2009, the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission by the European Space Agency (ESA) has undergone a continuous calibration and imaging procedures improvement to produce valuable geophysical data over land, ice and ocean. However, a problem which does persist is the so-called land-sea contamination (LSC) effect. This paper unveils the nature of this artifact, which is caused by a multiplicative (scene dependent) bias in the retrieved brightness temperature images. The origin of LSC is traced down to SMOS calibration parameters to yield a simple correction scheme which is validated against several geophysical scenarios. This paper shows how autoconsistency rules in interferometric synthesis together with redundant and complementary calibration procedures provide a robust SMOS calibration scheme.